All businesses grow big, too big to adapt, and then they die. Success in the past creates momentum toward the future, but it also creates an anchor, tying a business down to past customers and past technology.

Technology has highly accelerated the business cycle and, thereby, shortened the likely lifespan of any tech business. Basically, you have to reinvent the company every three years updating old technology and bringing existing customers with you. When we owned our software company, we say five generations of competitors come and go over a fifteen-year span.

So far, Google has done a great job of navigating changes in technology but the company is not very old. The real test comes as the management team ages. The greater the success, the greater the hubris of the people involved.

It seems like, just months ago, the NFL was a timeless brand, one with a monopoly of sorts. Look what is happening to it now. While it still retains most of its audience, the percentage of audience it has lost is the difference between profitability and losses from now on. Big organizations do not shrink well. They also tend to take others with them, in the NFL’s case, the TV Networks.

Invisibility is the problem with such fatal weaknesses. They exist in the blind spots of decision-makers. The fact that it isn’t easy to see Google weaknesses today, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Most people never learn the strategic tools that reveals them.